An out-of-box experience

My iMac arrived today. The box says it's a 24 inch, widescreen computer. When did we start selling computers by the inch?

In fact, I'm typing this blog entry in using it. When I told my macophile friends at work that I'd finally succumed to the lure-of-Apple, one of them asked me to report my experieces as a long time user of many other systems.

It seems like a worthy blog topic.

To capture the essence of my very first exposure to Mac: Mixed bordering on unpleasant.

[Sorry macomaniacs, but it's true.]

Issues (so far).

The first shock was the keyboard. This is one's my own fault.

When I was shopping I looked at the iMac at the Apple store where, of course they had wired keyboards. I am rather opinionated about my keyboards -- I use my own Das Keyboard (I would make this a hot-link to http://www.daskeyboard.com/ but blogger doesn't recognize control-shift-a when I type it on the Apple keyboard -- strke n+1
) (Thanks to Peter and Avani for gifting me the Das Keyboard.)

Where was I. O yeah. I tried the new mac keyboard in the store -- it wasn't great, but it was acceptable. However, I didn't want to be tethered -- I wanted a wireless keyboard and mouse,

When I told the guy at the Apple store that I wanted the wireless keyboard and mouse, he said that made it a custom system so they couldn't sell it at the store. I'd have to order it thru the web site (which I did.) -1 Apple for an annoy-your-customers-when-they're-ready-to-buy policy

Silly me, I assumed the wireless keyboard would be just the Mac keyboard with the cord chopped off. Wrong. Not only did they chop the cord off, they also chopped of half the keyboard -- in particular the number pad and navigation keys disappeard leaing only a whimpy set of arrow keys tucked down in the corner. To be fair, if I use this keyboard for a while I may like having the arrows nestled under my right pinkie, but I'll still miss the num pad, home, pgUp, and friends.

-1 Apple for producing a brain-dead keyboard. -1 to me for not shopping better.

A word here about the enclosed documentation. I think Apple got this one right. There was enough information written in clear English with illustrations. Other languages were available, too. No making up your own iconographic language to achieve equal-opportunity miscommunication. +1 for Apple

So I turned it on. It figured out that there was no mouse attached and showed me a picture of the wireless mouse with a clear animation showing the mouse's power switch being turned on. I obeyed, and it synched-up nicely with the bluetooth mighty mouse. +1 for Apple

Likewise it automatically detected the keybaord. Another +1.

It found my wireless network and painlessly established the connection. A definate +3. In fact I'm on line now (obviously!) without answering any questions about the wireless network except which of the networks it found I wanted to use.

It asked for my Apple ID & password for the account I had to set up to place the order at the Apple store. It used that to retrieve my name, address, etc (a nice touch), and went so far as to propose a user ID for me on this machine based on my name -- letting me override it, of course, if I wished to. Ok that gets yet another +1.

Then it started playing 20 questions. In particular it want to know my phone number -- which I hadn't supplied to the Apple store and didn't want to supply now! I'm not that kind of guy -- I don't give out my phone number to just anyone! (I HATE HATE HAtE phone spam -- and no, I don't trust Apple.) It insisted! It would not let me use the computer unless I told it my phone number. You had to enter a phone number that conformed to US phone number conventions to proceed (ok--they already knew I lived in the US. I assume the validation was locale specific.)

Gee, I sure hope they don't try to call me at 911-555-5555 You meet interesting people that way.

-5 for Apple, +3 for me.

And then it wanted to take my picture. It didn't explain why, but it wouldn't proceed until I let it. Now I'm feeling testy. -5 Apple; -2 for me (I'm not looking my best in the middle of the night when I did this!)

Next it produce a list of software for which upgrades were available. After asking nicely for my permission it download the upgrades, installed them and asked me to let it reboot. +2 for this seamless process.

Finally, we made it thru that and I ran into the biggest shock. I waited for Leopard to come out before I bought the iMac, but after surviving the install process I discovered I was now running on Tiger. Grrrrrrr -10 for Apple

There's a Leopard CD in the box (no Tiget CD), but I thought by going directly to Apple to buy the machine I would bypass the need to upgrade immediately. -3 for Apple. Other than including the CD, there's nothing that lets me know that I should upgrade. If I was a typical novice computer user I might well run Tiger for a long time before discovering that THEY PUT ThE WRONG OS ON THE MACHINE. -3 for Apple.

So that's the story so far. I'm still on Tiger, but Safari is working (oops -- I just tried to spell check this document using the blogger built-in spell checker and ended up with a massive javascript error message. -1 for Apple The cool thing is the javascript error message contains a list of my misspelled words. +1 for me ;-)

(and where's the @#$%^&*( delete key!)

Dale